Gigabit speeds, Campaign changes and Steam on target!

We have a lot of great information to share with you today that we think everyone is going to appreciate. We'll be discussing our newly installed and now functioning Gigabit bandwidth, then we'll talk about our upcoming Campaign changes inbound for Campaign 139, and finally we'll wrap up with an update on what sort of Steam progress we are making.

NEW GIGABIT ISP INSTALLED

Last night we were able to successfully install our new Gigabit bandwidth link, and it is currently running the Campaign and many other services. We have some DNS changes that we'll need to make which will cause some temporary interruptions with loading web pages and such. We expect things to settle down this coming week and at that point we'll be smooth sailing.

We'd like to thank you for your tremendous patience and understanding as we went from a 100 megabit line up to 1 gigabit, you can imagine how important this has been for the game to move forward especially as we prepare for a major influx in users on Steam.

During our March visit we updated our entire infrastructure internally to be at gigabit speeds, which allows communication of servers internally to be much smoother and we've already seen huge results from that. We expect some users to have noticeable improvements in speeds, however the biggest thing here is that when we start to get slammed from the incoming Steam users, our bandwidth will not get bottlenecked or be required to burst upwards.

A major kudos to our System Administrator PILOTMC for all of his tremendous work here getting our network configured, he did a top shelf job here, S!

CAMPAIGN 139 CHANGES INCOMING

With the news of 1.36 being frozen until after we get onto Steam's early access, there has been a lot of community discussion about what we're going to do here at CRS to help the situation as it is now. In light of those discussions it has become even more evident we need faster solutions brought to the table that work to relieve the HC officer's and our player base. So after careful consideration of player presented ideas and internal discussion, we have come up with the following to get started:

Re-supply timers (this means when a unit is used, the time it takes for RDP to rebuild it)

Currently: 15 Hours

Change to: 10 hours

Time a flag is training

Currently: 12 hours

Change to: 6 hours

Allow HC to manually send cut off flag to training

Currently requires 10% supply availability

Changing to 50% supply availability

Trickle in supply timer for brigade movements

Current standards

15 minutes for total re-supply

1 minute before first trickle

20 units per trickle

Changing to

30 minutes for total re-supply

1 minute before first trickle

20 units per trickle

Brigade movement timers

Frontline - rear line

Currently: 60 minutes

Change to: 30 minutes

Rear-rear line

Currently: 30 minutes

Change to: 15 minutes

We are still considering other options however these are the solutions that are currently on the table.

Justifications include:

Re-supply timers: This will reduce the burden on officers having to rotate flags routinely. It will also provide more time zones with adequate supply that could've been expended earlier in the day.

Time flag is in training: A flag in training for 1/2 a day can be devastating to securing the lines. We want these flags returned to the front in a reasonable time frame.

Allow HC to manually route their flag(s): If you are faced in an impossible situation to un-route your flags, we want to allow HC officers a quicker ability to execute this. Same strategy as point #2.

Trickle in supply: We think 15 minutes might be too quick for brigades to re-stock their supply to 100% after a brigade has been moved. So we want to slow that process down and determine its effect.

Brigade movement timers: Anything on the front-front doesn't change, but we want officers to be able to cover any strategic blunders more rapidly. If the enemy has exposed your lines and you are in a retreat you should be able to cover that faster than what we currently offer.

STEAM PROGRESS

All good news here, we are definitely still on track for Summer of 2017 for releasing. With our new Gigabit bandwidth we covered a very essential task there to make sure we didn't have any bottlenecks on our network.

Our Campaign cluster (which means a set of servers) will change prior to Steam's launch to the new hardware that is getting some polish work and improvements. HATCH has been on point with everything at our colocation (where the servers are stored), and particularly interesting he added much better CPU's to the servers that the Campaign will be on, which in effect will of course make it run much faster and smoother.

GADGET has been tasked with getting the Steam <-> Billing connection in order and she's making some phenomenal progress there, according to her report, at about 75% completed and nearing completion rapidly. VICTARUS setup the new Steam Client UI flow so they can easily launch the game, make an account and login all within the game client, not bad eh? In time our users will see something similar with PlayGate no longer being around, but that's a bit more down the road just yet.

FRISBONE has been working closely with our OPERATIONS team to determine how many users we'll be able to host on the Campaign cluster concurrently and they're having very productive discussions and analysis take place that give us some measurable numbers. Our Quality Assurance team is working closely with DEV/OPS to test Multi-Client which will allow us to simulate thousands of users in the game cluster to make sure it can handle the stress ~ on that note, this is a pretty great tool to have rebuilt and working, we simply wouldn't have another way to do it at the moment and it's a key component to making sure our release is successful.

DAGGER and I have been monitoring the Steam analytics and traffic and things are looking sharp, we're generating about 3x more traffic on a daily basis than all of our other marketing efforts combined through Steam. In addition to that we now have over 1800 users signed up to our Steam group and the Wishlist numbers are growing nicely (this is all pre-release, which only means it'll get better later).

All in all we're making some exceptional progress and we're on target to making things happen in the timeline we've set.

We'd like to thank you for all of your words of encouragement, your subscriptions and being the best community we could ever ask for! If you're ready to help the cause further and have the means to do so, consider becoming a Hero Builder for $29.99/mo or $359.99/yr and support our development team accomplish so much more. For full details on the Hero Builder program (click here).

So very proud of you all! I've always been a believer in what this game can accomplish. I really like the idea of slowed down fill timers...could even be expanded on with Brigade type, route, terrain and weather affecting the timer.